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Description

Flying a light aircraft requires keeping track of the fuel onboard at all times. This is easy enough to do with just a wrist watch, pen and paper, but it's nice to have a countdown timer running to reference at a glance and as a backup.

Some aircraft owners keep a digital countdown timer stuck on the panel somewhere, and some panels have a digital countdown timer built in. Full "glass" panel aircraft (eg. with a Garmin G1000) appear to have fuel/time management features in their software, however none of the aircraft I fly regularly have (full) glass cockpits.

This project aims to build a small device that helps manage fuel time available in multiple tanks - essentially a glorified countdown timer with multiple timers. It originally started as an exercise in how much UI could be packed into a microcontroller, but it's definitely a tool I want in the cockpit now.

Details

Features

Core

Display time remaining in each tank

Switch active tank.Fuel can be drained from one tank at a time or both tanks simultaneously. The user selects the tanks that are currently selected in the aircraft, which causes those tank's endurance timers to count down (with time divided across multiple tanks if cross-feeding is in use.)

Pre-flight programming state allowing at least configuration of time in each tank

Start flight action

End flight action (to prevent warning features tripping)

Useful (automatic)

Display elapsed flight time

Display elapsed time on current tank

Indicator light when near and at fuel change time. Blinking light when in reserve time.

Sleep between updates to save power? We only need to be awake to update the screen every few seconds during a flight.

Alert sound loud enough to be heard in the cockpit:

short chirp to indicate it's time to switch tanks, or time is overdue

a more worrying alert to notify entering reserve time, plus a repeated alert every five or ten minutes to remind the pilot of the status.

persistent alarm should sound when running dangerously low on tank time or on total remaining flight time. For tank time where there is adequete fuel remaining in the other tank, the alarm may not be dismissable. For other cases, the persistent alarm may be silenced to a chirp every minute.

Useful (some manual config/action required)

Configure fuel change time

Configure date and time

Scroll through log of fuel changes this flight

Other

Persist state across power outages (aka. store start time, start config and fuel changes in EEPROM so they can be recovered on power restored). This is useful to stop bumps that may dislodge the battery, an accidental power off, or a change of battery from interrupting an in progress flight.

Allow entering fuel quantities and have the program work out the time per tank. At minimum, this could be a single screen where instead of configuring time for two tanks, you config quantity in each tank, plus burn per hour and unusable fuel. The burn per hour and unusable could be recalled from EEPROM.

Low power mode where the user has to trigger an interupt to see the display for five seconds at a time.

Wireless module with 7-segment display(s) to mount to instrument panel. This could show time remaining in current tank/flight, or some configurable value.

Project Logs

This project has existed in breadboard-form on my desk for 18 months. Though this is the first update in a while, it's a project I tinker on a lot: there's a menu system that's easy to work with, views can be pushed and popped, user input is transferred around automatically, and the event-loop is an interesting way to organise an embedded project. Problem is, none of these are core features. These things are polished not because they need to be, but because I've been putting off the harder task of making decisions about the in-flight views of the device.

Earlier in the project I'd sketched out a bunch of screens to see what might fit into in the limited screen resolution:

Various view sketches. The top, second from the left screen is the original way I considered displaying in-flight information.

Great questions. Using time is definitely not state of the art technology, and you're quite right that running out of fuel in an aircraft means you're gonna have a bad time.

From my flight training, experience and some research, I would say that the use of time comes down to operational aspects more than a lack of technology. Specifically, managing the phase of flight where accurate fuel information is the most critical: pre-flight planning.

Enjoy this project?

Discussions

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I ran across this site by accident. I have been trying to build such a device for a long time. Given that fuel exhaustion is the leading cause of engine stoppage, it is surprising we don't have something in the market. The timers that Sporty's and ASA sell are don't do the job because they are not LED (hard to see), and they don't sound any alarms. What I would like to see is a simple but bright countdown timer (minutes, not seconds), and would starting making a lot of noise and flash lights when you get below a certain threshold.